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Sturm und Drang… & Stuff

We had a huge electrical storm a short while ago. Poor Fritz was terrified, and I have to admit that although I love storms and hardly ever get scared, there were a few thunder claps that sounded like they were literally tearing up the skies, which brought up an instinct to want to hide under something, which is what Fritz promptly did. That made me think of Astérix et Obelix and their gang of Gauls, who didn’t mind going into the most violent battles, but were scared that the sky would quite literally fall on their heads. Well I managed to stay upright and didn’t seek shelter but I did think it prudent to switch off the power on my computer, something I never do in the daytime. That was a small reminder of how helpless and small we are even with all our technology and our stubborn and misguided notion that we are somehow the rightful owners of this planet to mistreat and abuse as we please. We had a similar downpour yesterday, though without the special sound effects and once it was over, it was a beautiful, quiet sunny day again, and then I found out that in parts of the States they had terrible flooding which was wreaking havoc for everyone. And though I’m certainly not happy when nature causes us pain and suffering when it chooses to afflict us with some catastrophe, I am always awed and amazed to see that nature will always be a power far far greater than we’ll ever be which, with my strange logic, I take to be a good thing. Because it keeps us human beings in check, lest we let our monstrous egos get the better of us and we go imagining that we can rule the entire universe. I don’t know why, but an image of Bush and his league of power hungry bigots came to mind as I was typing the last sentence.

It’s official: yesterday I took down my Blog365 links from this page and replaced them with a B.O.W.: Blogging Without Obligation insignia instead, which means I’ve dropped out of the race. Just can’t handle the pressure of blogging everyday anymore. As I was explaining to both my mum and dad, who are my most devoted readers, several factors contributed to my decision. For one thing, the time investment required to keep up my standard of content and visuals was simply unreasonable. The countless hours and days of research, and then almost as many hours to physically put together the posts was staggering. My dad suggested I go back and write how many hours some of my posts took to get ready for publishing, but I don’t think anybody cares about that, especially if the post ends up looking like it took no effort at all. Not that I’m complaining. Of course it’s a process I enjoy and I wouldn’t do it otherwise, but the fact is I was spending my entire days (and sometimes nights too) on my blogging obsession. Sometimes—and more and more frequently—I would slap something together in a jiffy just to make sure I met the quota, which was fine, but did not meet my quality standards. Then, because all this didn’t leave me much time to socialize with other bloggers, I saw my readership go in a steep decline and was growing a little bit resentful to be doing all this work if nobody was coming to look at it. It’s crazy the situations we can get ourselves out of some sense of honour or a misdirected commitment or principle. It’s all a bit ironic too because when I started blogging I was just doing it for myself and wasn’t concerned about others reading me or not. So that’s it in a nutshell, that’s what I should get back to. So now I blog whenever I want, I can take all the time in the world doing research or building up my posts even if only me and my mum and dad see them, but more importantly not posting gives me plenty of time do to other things too, which is quite exciting but also necessary at this point in my life. That being said, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time making up “my ideal” book wish list and it occurred to me that I should share it here, so just as soon as I’ve finished putting it together and I find it more or less meets my standards, you’ll be seeing it right here so we can start up a debate on what is really an “ideal” booklist. Right here on From Smiler, with Love.